Privacy policy

Research Briefs publishes plain-language summaries of newly published scientific research, built from open scholarly metadata and openly available source material. This policy explains what personal data the website collects, why, and what you can do about it. It covers this website only.

No account is required to read anything, and we do not build reader profiles. When you visit, our server records the ordinary technical information any web server needs in order to serve a page and stay secure: your IP address, browser user agent, the page requested, and the time of the request. These logs are used for operating the site, diagnosing faults, and detecting abuse such as scraping or brute-force attempts. They are not used to profile readers or build advertising audiences.

Each article carries a simple view counter that increases by one when the page is opened. It is a single number stored on the article, used to work out which articles are popular. It records nothing about who viewed the page.

An account is optional, and is only needed to save topics you want to follow. We store:

• your name and email address, as you enter them;
• your password, stored only as a cryptographic hash — we never see or store it in readable form;
• whether and when you confirmed your email address;
• the topics you have chosen to save;
• your active login sessions, which include the IP address and browser user agent used to sign in, so that sessions can be kept secure and expired.

Email we send to account holders is strictly transactional: address confirmation and password resets. We do not operate a newsletter and we do not send marketing email.

We set two cookies, both strictly necessary for the site to function: a session cookie that keeps you signed in and remembers form state, and a CSRF token cookie that protects forms against cross-site request forgery. Both are first-party.

We set no advertising, profiling or analytics cookies, and we embed no third-party trackers, social widgets or pixels. Web fonts are served from our own domain rather than a font provider, so simply reading a page sends no request to any third party.

• to deliver the website and keep you signed in;
• to keep the service secure and prevent abuse;
• to diagnose errors and improve performance;
• to show which articles and topics are most read, using aggregate counts only.

For readers in the UK and EEA, our lawful bases are legitimate interests (operating and securing the website), and performance of a contract (running your account, if you create one).

We do not sell, rent or trade personal data, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers. Personal data is handled only by the service providers we need in order to run the site, acting on our instructions:

• our hosting provider, which operates the servers and stores the database and logs;
• our email delivery provider, which sends confirmation and password-reset messages.

We may also disclose data where we are legally required to do so.

Research metadata we publish — titles, authors, institutions, journals, abstracts — comes from open scholarly sources and concerns published academic work. Where that metadata names an author, it is information those authors published with their research and which is already publicly available.

Our articles are written from that published research and its openly available source material, and are checked against our editorial and safety rules before publication. That process draws on research publications, not reader data: no personal information about visitors or account holders is used in producing articles, or shared with the external services involved in producing them.

We post our own articles to our pages on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. If you follow or interact with us there, that interaction happens on the platform and is governed by the platform's own privacy policy, not this one. We receive only the aggregate, anonymous page statistics those platforms provide, and we do not obtain your personal data from them.

Account data is kept for as long as the account exists, and is deleted when the account is deleted. Login sessions expire automatically after a period of inactivity. Server logs are rotated and discarded on a short cycle in the ordinary course of operating the site.

Depending on where you live, you have the right to:

• ask what personal data we hold about you and receive a copy;
• have inaccurate data corrected;
• have your data deleted;
• object to or restrict certain processing;
• complain to your local data protection authority.

If you have an account, you can review and correct your name, email address and password yourself at any time from your account settings, and remove saved topics from your dashboard. To request a copy of your data or have your account and its data deleted, email us at the address below and we will action it.

The site is intended for a general adult audience. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from children. If you believe a child has created an account, contact us and we will remove it.

Health and medicine summaries on this site are provided for general information only and are not medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Reading them creates no clinician–patient relationship. Always speak to a qualified healthcare professional about your own health.

If this policy changes, we will update the page and revise the “last updated” date at the top. Material changes will be summarised here.

Questions about this policy, or requests about your data, can be sent to support@researchbriefs.org.